Industrial control systems are designed using hardware and software components for the purpose of automated monitoring and controlling of industrial machinery executing an automated factory process. Such an Industrial Control System 1, for example as shown in FIG. 1, generally has as at least one Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) 2, one or more clients 3, 4 and multiple devices 5, 6, 7 all connected through a Communication Network 8. Performance assessment of such an industrial control system to optimize the system is preferably done prior to investing and building of the control system. Such performance assessment requires the development of a model of the industrial control system. The main indicator for performance assessment is the time delay between components, in particular the end-to-end delay for a message to go from a device sending the message to a device intended to receive the message. One approach involves evaluation of analytic models that compute the time delay of all components and define a temporal performance in terms of maximum time delay between components. Another approach is the simulation of a state space model, such as a Coloured Petri Net model. In a coloured Petri Net, the tokens of a Petri Net may be assigned a value or a set of values, which is referred to as a colour.
The modelling of an industrial control system (ICS) using Petri Nets requires an expert to manually model all components of an ICS architecture. Whether a new architecture is designed or an existing architecture is modified, for each modification a new Petri Net model needs to be built. This is because the Petri Nets formalism requires a specific structure and specific token colours based on the defined architecture.
Furthermore, for increasing complex ICS architecture it becomes very difficult to build a model. Moreover, a slight modification in ICS architecture is not easily carried over in the model: it cannot be readily adapted to reflect a modification in the ICS. This is regardless of whether the modification relates to the ICS architecture or to the configuration of parameters.